Identity
“I don’t like it” is not a brand strategy: taste, trends and the brands that last
Every brand review eventually reaches the same sentence. Over the years, I have learned to treat it as the beginning of a question, not the end of one.
Every brand review eventually reaches the same sentence. Over the years, I have learned to treat it as the beginning of a question, not the end of one.
By Aletzeh
When I teach branding, I always show my students a slide. Down the left side are Pepsi’s logos, from 1898 to 2023: a nervous red script, a bottle cap, a globe, a wave, a smile, and a globe again. Down the right side, Coca-Cola. That column is almost empty. There is the first script, from the 1880s, and then, much further down, the one on today’s cans. The script in both is nearly the same.
Then I tell them something that always sounds like an exaggeration: a good brand should last at least ten years.
I have been thinking about that sentence more than usual lately. Our own studio is about to turn ten.
Why ten years
The statement is strong on purpose. Creating a brand or going through a rebrand asks a company for a large investment, often a significant share of its income in proportion to its size. And yet many brands begin to fail within two years, in one of two ways.
Some become irrelevant: the market grew, the audience changed, and the brand did not grow with them. Others look dated, because they were built on a design trend that has already passed.
When I look closely at those cases, the cause is almost always the same. The project was built on an aesthetic concept alone. Somewhere along the way, the strategic questions were left out of the room.
The sentence every review meeting reaches
Sooner or later, someone looks at a proposal and says, “I don’t like it.” I have heard it from founders, from marketing teams, from boards. I have said it myself.
It feels like the most personal judgment we can make. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent years showing that it is far less personal than it feels. In Distinction, published in 1979, he studied how people in France judged art, music, food and furniture. He found that their preferences followed their education, their upbringing and the people around them with remarkable precision. Taste, he argued, is learned. It is shaped by what he called the habitus, the habits of seeing and judging we absorb without noticing. One of his lines has stayed with me for years:
“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”
In other words, when I say I don’t like something, I am often describing where I come from, what I have seen and who I have spent time with. That is a fascinating thing to know about myself. It is a dangerous thing to build a brand on.
A brand is bigger than the team running it.
A company’s brand team changes. Directors leave, agencies rotate, founders step back. The brand is meant to outlast all of them. So when a decision rests on “I like it,” it rests on the taste of whoever happens to be in the room that season.
That is why, in our reviews, I try to replace one question with several better ones:
Does it work for the objectives we set? Does it communicate what we need people to understand? Will the people we serve recognize it as ours, and will it still be ours in ten years? Is this decision coming from the brand’s essence, or from what everyone else is doing right now?
None of these questions makes taste irrelevant. Aesthetic judgment is still the craft we bring to every project. It simply stops being the verdict and becomes a tool.
When everyone likes the same thing
If taste follows context, then a whole industry can come to like the same thing at the same time. That is how a trend is born, and how brands begin to look alike.
You have seen it, even if you don’t know its name. In 2017, Facebook introduced an illustration style called Alegria, created with the studio Buck: flat figures with long, bendable limbs, small heads, and bright, untextured color. Within a few years, versions of it were everywhere, from fintech apps to public transport campaigns. It was friendly, inexpensive, and easy to reproduce. People started calling it Corporate Memphis. By 2023, the design press described its decline as the result of uninspired work and oversaturation. The style that had once made a company look modern now made it look like everyone else.
Luxury, the category where identity should matter most, has not been immune. In 2018, Burberry retired its Equestrian Knight and introduced a clean sans serif wordmark, at a moment when several fashion houses were moving toward strikingly similar logotypes. Five years later, under a new creative director, the brand brought the knight back, a symbol it traces to a public competition around 1901.
In both stories, aesthetics won over strategy, at least for a while. And reversing that decision costs time, money, and recognition that took years to build.
The pull of the algorithm
I understand the temptation, because I feel it too. We are often told that platforms reward what is current: the trending format, the familiar look, the sound everyone is using. Following the trend can bring attention quickly.
But attention is not the same as memory. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, summarized in Jenni Romaniuk’s Building Distinctive Brand Assets, shows that the elements people use to recognize a brand- its colors, shapes, symbols, and characters- build their value through consistent, repeated exposure. Change them, and those cues are lost; you have to rebuild recognition from the start.
This is the real difference between the two columns on my slide. Coca-Cola has written its name in the same Spencerian script since 1886. Pepsi has reinvented itself many times. In 2023, for its 125th anniversary, it introduced its first new logo in fourteen years, and it looked. backward to do it, returning to the globe it used in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Foundations and paint
So how do you stay relevant without becoming a trend? The image I use with my students is a house.
The structure of a house keeps it standing: the foundations, the beams, the load-bearing walls. If you try to move them, everything falls. In a brand, that structure is its identity: the idea it stands for, its name, its symbol, its core colors and typography, its voice. These should change rarely, and only when the business itself has changed.
Then there is paint, furniture and decoration. They can and should change with the seasons. In a brand, that is communication: campaigns, content, photography, illustration, a new format for a new platform. This is where a brand can play with what is current, because a trend in the paint does not threaten the walls.
When a strategy is solid, built on research about competitors and customers and on a consistent brand essence, a company rarely needs to change its logo. It may need adjustments from time to time, and its advertising should keep renewing itself. But the foundations stay.
I have lived this with one brand for years. Since 2018, we have worked with haus, Liverpool’s exclusive home and décor brand, present in millions of Mexican homes. When we began, the team asked us for a complete rebrand. After studying the brand, its products, and its customers, we recommended waiting. The strategy we proposed would modernize both the brand and the product, but that change would take time to reach the shelves. A new identity before then would have promised something the store could not yet deliver.
So we started with the interior. We refreshed the palettes, organized the offer into clear categories such as Holidays and Kids & Teens, and defined the brand’s product DNA: which pieces belong to haus and which do not. We refined its photographic and advertising style so the agencies in charge could carry it out consistently. The logo stayed where it was.
By 2021, the change was tangible, and Liverpool decided the moment had come for a new identity, which we developed together with Tribecca. Even then, the new image kept what had earned its place: the “h” drawn as a chair, the typographic texture and the Oxford gray. Last year, we designed the book that tells the brand’s first thirty years. Today, haus describes its own collections as a mix of timeless pieces and trend pieces. Foundations and paint, in its own words.
Fidelity, not nostalgia
None of this argues against change. A brand that never evolves becomes irrelevant, the first of the two failures. The work lies in balancing what is current, what is permanent, and what is faithful to the brand’s own aesthetic, and in judging every decision by whether it serves the brand’s objectives rather than whether it pleases us.
A brand built that way can last many years without substantial changes. It speaks from its own DNA, stays faithful to it, and remains attractive in whatever context it finds itself. Anything else is a trend, and a trend is an expensive, unstrategic place to build a company.
Ten years from now, I would like someone to look at the brands we have built and be unable to guess the year they were born. To me, that would be the highest compliment.
Sources
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1979)
Burberry, 2018 and 2023 — Design Week
Coca-Cola script, 1886 — Trademark Chronology
Jenni Romaniuk, Building Distinctive Brand Assets (2018) — summary